Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Exkurs (Gibson Winter, Mead); Intersubjektivität; Dialektik: Streben nach Wahrheit - Anerkennung

Kurzinhalt: ... there are operative two distinct principles of change that correspond to the two levels on which the gesture and response demand reconciliation.1 The first principle is the drive towards intelligibility, towards truth, towards value.

Textausschnitt: Exkurs (eü)

46/6 The following explanation of the overarching schemes and patterns of society and history in terms of a subjective account of the genesis of meaning will involve the heuristic structure of emergent probability. The responsible actions, projects, and routines of two or more individuals can link together to form an operative pattern or scheme in which all members participate intelligently and responsibly but which none need have devised and which none need understand completely for the scheme to operate. Such is the structure of the probably emergent scheme of recurrence. In this account the constitutive elements are acts of meaning (whether acts of knowing fact, or, far more regularly, intelligently integrated sets of performance skills). But the structures of society and history are constituted by the schemes in which the recurring classes of intelligent acts link together in a mutually conditioning pattern. And far from precluding the operation of individual acts of intelligence, such an explanation would require their habitual recurrence. This, in outline, is the response to this second objection. But to develop this notion of social and historical schemes will involve a discussion and development of the notion of 'intersubjectivity.' (181; Fs)

47/6 In Insight, Lonergan points to evidence of a spontaneous, intersubjective bond, operative vitally and affectively, linking subjects together in a common field of experience.1 In Method he introduces 'intersubjectivity' as the 'vital and functional' unity of subjects 'that precedes the distinction of subjects and survives its oblivion.'2 As the spontaneous concern for another's welfare, as the spontaneous empathy with another's object of concern, and as the immediate grasp of the irreductible meaning of another's smile, the intersubjective 'we' has its roots in the vital experiences of human subjects in the biological and aesthetic patterns but continues to operate as a condition for the whole range of intelligent and responsible acts of individuals and cultures.3 But it is in Gibson Winter's Elements for a Social Ethic that we can find an account of the recurrent structure of intersubjective exchange among subjects. (181f; Fs)

48/6 Winter's account of the threefold structure of sociality, developed in Elements, did not draw upon Lonergan's work, but rather sought in the work of Alfred Schütz a corrective to an overly deterministic presentation of George Herbert Mead.4 However, Mead's original account of the structure of gesture and response and Winter's reconstruction of Mead both explain the emergence of social identity in terms of a recurring set of acts which, once initiated, operate in a specific order of succession.5 (182; Fs)

49/6 Mead began with a view of the individual person which was developed in the tradition of behaviorism and pragmatic philosophy, and he sought to find how an individual's sense of identity came to be a social identity.6 He developed a threefold pattern of gesture and response, in which an individual comes to see him or herself through the eyes of another person when he or she initiates a gesture, receives a response to the gesture, and in looking at him or herself through the eyes of the responding person interprets how the gesture must have looked to that other person. Mead argued that our sense of who we are emerges not so much in the picture we form of ourselves through our own acts but in the way that we see them through the eyes of others in the responses that they make to us.7 (182; Fs)

50/6 Winter found Mead's account unsatisfactory because it placed too much emphasis upon the socially determined character of our identity.8 He argued that the response to one's gesture is followed not simply by an acceptance of the other's view of who we are or what we meant, but by a drive to what Winter calls 'unification.'9 If another's response presents an image of who we are and what we meant that differs from what we intended by our gesture, we reflect on our original meaning and try to objectify our own image of ourselves that was implicit in this gesture. We compare this image with that presented by the other's response and seek to reconcile the two images with the other person. Thus the third stage or event in the threefold scheme is a drive to unification that conceivably could involve considerable further gesturing and responding until a unification is reached or until the reconciliation process is given up as beyond the resources of time and place.10 (182; Fs)

51/6 Winter explains this threefold structure of sociality in the terms and relations of a philosophical background that is somewhat different from Lonergan's. Nonetheless his account has the form of the scheme of recurrence.11 Each stage functions as the fulfilling condition for the next stage and each stage is an event that can be classified irrespective of the particular meaning that it intends. The gesture always invites a response and we can all recollect personal experiences wherein responding to a gesture was almost impossible to avoid. The response is to the gesture, and it interprets the meaning of the gesture as well as invites its own confirmation or rejection as an adequate interpretation. And the drive to unification brings both the gesture and the response forward to reconcile them on two distinct levels: on the level of the coherence, the truth or the value in what the subjects intended, and on the level of the relative need for mutual confirmation and approval among the persons in dialogue.12 The proper operation of the scheme requires the fulfillment of a determinate set of conditions: competence in the appropriate range of language, a certain antecedent interest and willingness to see the scheme through to unification, sufficient time and resources.13 And the recurrent operation of the scheme sets the context and fulfills the conditions for the development of virtually all the social skills from the child's most primitive engagement with its mother's gestures of affection to the most sophisticated political maneuverings among heads of state. (182f; Fs)
52/6 It is quite regularly in the context of this threefold pattern that sense and motor skills are learned. And the careful gesturing and responding of a sensitive educator can increase significantly the probabilities associated with the assimilation and adjustment developmental scheme described above. 14 By providing the student with the appropriate clues and by responding with affection and approval when a difficult discovery has been made or a group of operations has been performed successfully, the educator can significantly accelerate the rate of learning and development. (183; Fs)

53/6 In Winter's reconstruction of Mead there can be discerned not only the structure of the recurrence scheme, but also a second instance of Lonergan's notion of dialectic. In the drive to unification there are operative two distinct principles of change that correspond to the two levels on which the gesture and response demand reconciliation.15 The first principle is the drive towards intelligibility, towards truth, towards value. In Lonergan's terms, it is the drive of the transcendentals seeking higher order integrations of experiential data of the neural manifold into intelligible orders and into unified complexes of questions, and answers that meet the questions and lay them to rest. It is the drive to coordinate and integrate the manifold of skills within the subject's repertoire in the light of insights, judgments of truth, affective apprehensions of value and the grasp of possible courses of action that realize new human futures judged to be worthwhile. (183; Fs) (notabene)

54/6 The second principle is the drive towards expression and confirmation of what is understood, judged, decided, with another person. It is the desire to understand and to be understood by another, to love and to be loved as a whole person. This second principle is linked to the first inasmuch as what we seek to share with another and to have understood by another is the content of an intelligent or responsible act. But it is opposed to the first because the drive to expression and confirmation wants a confirmation of the subject as a whole person, and not simply an approval of an intelligently grasped meaning. Thus while the initial gesture invites the approval of the other on the truth or value of what is expressed, the drive towards the intelligent grasp of truth and the affirmation and actualization of value is easily suppressed in favour of the more powerful and the more immediately felt need for the other's affection and approval. Similarly, the massive and exclusive cultivation of the cognitional skills can result in a person so relentlessly pursuing some knowledge that he or she runs roughshod over the feelings of others and finally isolates him or herself from the spontaneous care and concern of others.16 (183f; Fs) (notabene)

55/6 Though the effect of this operation of the three-stage, dialectically operative scheme can be the suppression of questions for intelligence or the alienation of oneself from others, the opposition between the two principles of change as frequently has the effect of driving the subjects to new data, to reformulations of questions, to more remotely related insights, to a reconsideration of the other's position or feelings, or to a rediscovery that other people truly care about one's welfare. And even more profoundly, this drive to unification leads to collaboration in the conception and execution of projects and to patterns of social interaction and organization that pursue a desired result which none could have achieved on their own.17 This operation of the dialectic is fundamentally what Lonergan has conceived as the dialectic of community.18 But with the introduction of Gibson Winter's threefold structure of sociality, the dynamic structure of the operation of this dialectic is clarified and expanded. The tension in the dialectic of community remains, as Lonergan has described it, the tension between 'intersubjective spontaneity and intelligently devised social order.'19 (184; Fs)

56/6 But the introduction of Winter's scheme further explains the structure of the dialectical dynamism involved in the transition from a society characterized predominately by a vital, spontaneous, affective mutuality and a society in which this mutuality is operative in collaborative acts and schemes of practical intelligence that yield greater goods for all. The good of order20 (the intrinsic worth of collaborating towards such further collaborative value) is sought, not originally out of the drive of intelligence but rather out of the drive towards mutuality, collaboration, the sense of approval one gets from belonging and participating in a group. The operations of intelligence are harnessed, first haphazardly, then systematically in service of this drive towards mutual confirmation and mutual love. But intelligence has its own immanent criteria and so the extension of the operations of practical intelligence into the realm of intersubjectivity is the introduction of a second principle or operator that is as uncompromising as the first. The drive towards unification with another needs to be a unification in accordance with the criteria of intelligence as well as a unification in a true, non-abusive care. And while compromise on the principle of cooperation and agreement might seem to yield the tumultuous consequence of anarchy and revolution a compromise of intelligence yields the equally destructive failure of poorly conceived plans and the distortions that ensue from 'group bias.'21 (184f; Fs)